Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 - Part 3

Welcome to part three of my series on Microsoft Small Business Server 2000. Article One of the series covered the basics of installing SBS 2000, including planning the install and ensuring your hardware meets the basic requirements, while Article Two tackled the preparation for moving a user's mail and data to a new machine.

The third article in Andy Goodman's Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 series covers a couple of installation issues, one being incorporating Windows XP boxes onto SBS networks and a second addressing problems with the client startup script.

I had planned on walking you through installing the servers and importing the data in this article, but a few things have popped up which I think need to be addressed first. Some of you already have SBS boxes up and running, and there are a couple of issues that have been plaguing me so I thought I would save you the grief I have been going through.

First of all, with the release of Windows XP is the matter of putting those new XP boxes on your SBS Network.
Microsoft recently released a paper on the subject called "How
to Set Up Windows XP Professional Client in SBS 2000 Network" (KB Article
Q316418), but
of course there is a gotcha. Even if you follow the recommendations to the
letter you may find some of the new XP boxes can not complete a "Windows
Update" session. What you need to do in this case is open the Network
Places properties window and find the icon for your LAN connection. Right click
on it and remove the check for the box by QoS.
The default is for it to be checked. Un-checking it will allow "Windows
Update" to complete.

Back to installing the clients, personally I find it easier to just put the XP
Box on the network using the first portion of the manual
instructions and then use the
"Add Software" function in the SBS Admin Console to add the ISA Client,
the Outlook Client and the Modem Sharing Client. If this does not work for you
then you have found the second issue I wanted to cover in this article.

If you have made any changes to the SBS_LOGIN_SCRIPT.BAT file, you may find that the client
startup script is not firing. One tell-tale sign is there is no company folder
on the desktop. There is an easy fix for this problem. Edit the
SBS_LOGIN_SCRIPT.BAT file which you can find located at:

"C:\WINNT\SYSVOL\domain\scripts"
and add CALL to the beginning of each line. Don't forget to leave a blank space
after the word call. This will keep the login script from getting lost. This is
an old DOS command which says to the system execute the line and return to the
next line. You may find that the client software installer runs the next time
each user logs on. This will only happen once if you let it continue its
installation. The next time they logon it will notice all the software is
installed and continue on as normal.

While we are
talking about updates there is an update to the com services which you should
install to the SBS 2000 server and any 2000 clients you may have on your
network. If you go to Windows Update and then Product Updates and then
Recommended Updates it is called COM+ Rollup Package 18.1
and the KB article about it is [Q313582].

Looking for more tips and useful info about SBS? Check out
Harry Brelsford's site at www.nethealthmon.com. While you're
there you can sign up for his great SBS newsletter. Harry is the author of Small
Business Server 2000 Best Practices (reviewed here)
a few months ago.

See you next time when we will install the Servers, create the User Accounts, and restore the Exchange Data.